This week’s G20 summit in Johannesburg will bring Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to our shores.(Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
South Africa’s leadership on Palestine has set a global example. That same moral clarity must now confront Narendra Modi’s repression in Kashmir — and the horrors in Sudan and the Congo.
South Africa’s solidarity with the people of Palestine has restored moral purpose to our foreign policy and reminded the world that conscience still has a place in diplomacy. It has also renewed our collective sense of the moral centre of the national liberation struggle. Former Minister of International Relations Naledi Pandor, DIRCO Director-General Zane Dangor, and Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, have each become internationally recognised for taking principled and courageous positions. Dr Pandor would have been a deserving recipient of the Nobel Prize.
We led the way with the case at the International Court of Justice and helped form The Hague Group. Most South Africans support this stance, which has affirmed our moral leadership on the global stage. This clarity and courage now need to be extended to other places where people face horrific violence and silence from the international community, including Kashmir, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan.
This week’s G20 summit in Johannesburg will bring Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to our shores. His visit should not be welcomed. It should be met with peaceful protest and principled opposition. The same ethical conviction that drives us to support the Palestinian cause must compel us to denounce Modi’s government for its repression in Kashmir and the steady rise of Hindu fascism in India.
The occupation of Kashmir mirrors the occupation of Palestine. Both are rooted in settler colonialism and ethno-nationalist ideologies that deny people their right to self-determination. India under Modi has flooded the valley with troops and surveillance, shut down the internet, detained thousands without trial, and promoted demographic change by resettling outsiders. Any dissent is branded terrorism. Since India revoked Article 370 in 2019, stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its limited autonomy, the region has become one of the most militarised in the world.
Reports describe torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Whole communities live under curfew. Journalists are jailed. The United Nations resolutions guaranteeing a plebiscite have been ignored for nearly eight decades. The moral principle at stake is the same as in Gaza: no people can be denied freedom indefinitely. Our solidarity cannot be selective. We cannot condemn Zionist apartheid while turning a blind eye to Hindu fascism.
Modi’s government represents a fusion of religious nationalism, authoritarian power and crony capitalism. His Bharatiya Janata Party draws inspiration from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a paramilitary movement founded in 1925 and influenced by European fascism. Its project is to transform India into a Hindu state. The result has been catastrophic for what was once the world’s largest democracy.
Muslims are lynched in public. Christians, Sikhs and Dalits face persecution. Mosques are vandalised, homes demolished, and minorities turned into suspects in their own country. The state’s Islamophobia is not an aberration but the central pillar of an ideology that seeks to erase centuries of pluralism.
The European Parliament has condemned the regime. MEP Pierre Larrouturou described monstrous violence in Manipur, where hundreds were killed and churches destroyed, and said that in Kashmir the situation is even worse, with torture, disappearances and arbitrary detentions.
Yet while Western governments rush to sanction others, they remain silent on Modi because India is a vast market and a convenient counterweight to China. South Africa should not follow that hypocrisy.
South Africa’s response to Modi’s visit will also test whether we can act with the same assurance we showed on Palestine. We have demonstrated that a small country can take an independent and principled stand in global affairs. That confidence should now guide us to express solidarity just as clearly with the people of Kashmir, the Congo and Sudan.
When Modi arrives for the G20 summit, he will present himself as the leader of a thriving democracy. In truth, India under his rule has become one of the most repressive major states on earth. Civil society is crushed, universities purged, and journalists hounded. Kashmir is the laboratory of this authoritarianism. To welcome Modi without protest would be to betray our history. South Africa knows what it means to live under occupation and racial hierarchy. We know that peace without justice is an illusion. Our moral authority in world affairs comes precisely from the struggles we waged and the solidarities that sustained us. To remain silent when Modi arrives would be a failure of conscience.
Protests against Modi’s visit should not be narrow or sectarian. They must bring together people of all faiths and backgrounds who believe in democracy, human rights and international law. They must affirm that South Africans will not normalise fascism, whether it comes from Tel Aviv, Washington or New Delhi.
The same principle of universal solidarity must guide our response to crises beyond Kashmir and Palestine. In Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces have massacred civilians in El-Fasher and Bara, burning homes and starving communities.
In the Congo, millions have died in wars driven by foreign mining interests and regional power politics. These, too, are moral emergencies. South Africans have a special responsibility to speak out because our own freedom was won through international solidarity. Cuba, Tanzania and India once supported our struggle. Today we must honour that tradition by standing with those who continue to fight for dignity and justice.
Both India and Sudan show how violence and repression are used to hold together broken political orders. In Kashmir, the Indian state rules through occupation and fear. In Sudan, power rests on militias backed by foreign arms and money. These are not local pathologies but global ones, tied to profit, resource extraction and militarisation.
India’s economic rise has seduced many governments into silence, but the glitter of trade should not blind us to blood on the ground. South Africa cannot be complicit by omission. As we seek fairer global trade and reform of international institutions, we must also confront the militarised economies and political decay destroying lives in India and Sudan.
When Modi arrives in Johannesburg, South Africans should make it clear that he is not welcome as long as his government continues to occupy Kashmir, persecute minorities and insist that only Hindus are “true Indians.” Our solidarity with Palestine has, aside from our failure to stop coal exports, been magnificent. We must now refuse to allow any form of fascism to pass unchallenged.